News Links 01/04/2012

As well as aggregate UK private debt exceeding America’s, the UK also has a higher debt to GDP ratio for every sector. However as usual, government debt, about which politicians and neoclassical economists obsess, is the smallest component of total debt, and has only started to grow after the crisis began. To emphasise one point on which I emphatically agree with MMT economists, public debt is not the problem, and attempting to reduce public debt now is the wrong policy-from my perspective, because it would add public sector deleveraging to private sector deleveraging, thus exacerbating the underlying problem of deleveraging. Rather than obsessing about public debt now, politicians and economists should have been concerned about rising private debt in the previous two decades.

Now contrast that with the way we react to the abuse of police authority involved in the drug war, the inevitable killing and mutilation of civilians involved in dropping bombs on faraway lands, and all the other evils described by Greenwald above. That such actions are, in fact, evil is I take it something that the libertarian readers of this blog will find uncontroversial. But here’s the thing. Even though we believe that they are evil, they still don’t jump out at us in the way that Paul’s bigotry does. They’re just not as salient. And there are two main reasons for this.

Where is the examination of the pillars of our "FIRE" economy – Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. They became the interconnected cogs in a leverage machine to enrich themselves while plundering the rest of us. So far, this story affecting so many millions has not really crashed through in the 1 per cent media machine with a few exceptions here and there.

A number of handset makers in China, including Lenovo, ZTE, TCL, Coolpad and Konka, has formed an alliance in preparation to counter possible patent infringement lawsuits to bring upon by international players, according to industry sources in Taiwan.

Edward Harrison is the founder of Credit Writedowns and a former career diplomat, investment banker and technology executive with over twenty five years of business experience. He has also been a regular economic and financial commentator in print and on television for the past decade. He speaks six languages and reads another five, skills he uses to provide a more global perspective. Edward holds an MBA in Finance from Columbia University and a BA in Economics from Dartmouth College.